The Gupta Empire, in Cut Paper

What it is

A scroll‑driven history of the Gupta Empire, from about 320 to 550 CE, in nine scenes: from a single gold coin to what outlived the empire. Scroll and the story moves. Stop, and the stage keeps breathing.

How it was made

One rule governed everything: photos are evidence, paper acts. Real museum photographs only ever lift, slide, tilt or fold. Anything that moves with intent is cut paper, and the kings appear only as their coins.

The stage is plain DOM and CSS 3D, with no WebGL: planes, a camera, parallax, and shadows drawn on the plane behind each piece, so they slide as the camera moves. The proscenium is the real doorway of the Deogarh temple, cut into its carved bands and spaced wider. Later, the piece shows the uncropped doorway, so the liberty is confessed on screen.

Every date and name on screen points to an entry in one timeline. Every frame is a function of story time alone, so any moment can be reproduced exactly for review.

What I learned

Forty‑nine rounds of QA, in one day. In round one the gold figures “read as melted blobs”.

An accuracy check, before any pixels, found that the coin for Chandragupta II was the archer type, not the lion‑slayer.

The first rig posed characters by joint angle, so their hands never met what they were holding. The second poses them from the points of contact.

Aryabhata’s circles were cut. Any explanation of them would have been a claim I could not source.

The QA captures grew to 3.6 GB and crashed my machine. The archive now keeps contact sheets.

Credits

• Photographs of surviving objects via Wikimedia Commons, including the British Museum, LACMA and the Sarnath Museum. Cropped, masked and colour-graded; derivatives of CC BY-SA images are shared under the same licence. The full list, with licences, is at the end of the piece.
• Coastline and rivers: Natural Earth (public domain). Type: Alegreya and Noto Sans Brahmi (SIL Open Font License).